A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, by Carolyn Osiek and Margaret Y. MacDonald with Janet H. Tulloch. Minneapolis: Fortress, 2006. Pp. 352. $20.00 (paper). ISBN 0800637771. For several decades scholars, especially feminists, have tested new methods and theories in the study of women and gender in early Christianity and in antiquity more broadly. In A Woman's Place: House Churches in Earliest Christianity, Carolyn Osiek and Margaret MacDonald, with a chapter by Janet Tulloch, read these topics within the framework of early Christian families. They thus extend the work of a Society of Biblical Literature group of that name that has produced much interesting research in the last half decade or so. (Consider Halvor Moxnes's Putting Jesus in His Place [Louisville: Westminster John Knox, 2003]; and Osiek and David Balch's edited volume, Early Christian Families in Context [Grand Rapids: Eerdmans, 2003]). A Woman's Place also belongs alongside collections such as the new one by Osiek and Kevin Madigan, Ordained Women in the Early Church: A Documentary History (Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2005), or Ute Eisen's earlier work on the topic (Women Officeholders in Early Christianity: Epigraphical and Literary Studies [Collegeville, MN: Liturgical Press, Michael Glazier, 2000]), and it builds on MacDonald's previous study, Early Christian Women and Pagan Opinion (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996). This volume contains a wealth of references to and information about concepts of the family in the ancient world and it places an admirably large set of early Christian writings under analysis, bringing them into conversation with contemporaneous "pagan" literature.
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